Second-generation Australians migrants find themselves caught between two worlds

Travelling between Australia and China for work, Jenny Zhou says she often feels misunderstood.

Ms Zhou is a bilingual actress and TV presenter and is what many in the Chinese community call an “ABC” — Australian-born Chinese.

She was one of only two overseas students at Shanghai Theatre Academy in 2012, when she said lecturers and students questioned why she “couldn’t speak proper Mandarin”.

“They couldn’t get the fact that I was born in Australia,” she said, adding Mandarin isn’t even her mother tongue, as her parents speak Shanghainese — a Chinese dialect.

Now a fluent Mandarin speaker, Ms Zhou said she couldn’t help but still occasionally apologise for not speaking it perfectly.

“I hope one day people cannot tell that I have an…